Six years after deciding to go “all-in” with React Native, Shopify is ditching the framework and rewriting its software to go back to native, with the help of AI.
The e-commerce company said it had built a new AI-powered system to rewrite all its mobile apps in Swift and Kotlin, with its Shop app already fully rebuilt and launched as a native app in just 12 weeks.
Director of Engineering and Head of Mobile Mustafa Ali said that the growing coding capabilities of LLMs and agents had lessened the cost of maintaining different software for different platforms and made it easier to write in native code.
In a blog post, he wrote: “Agents can now do enough of the implementation, translation, testing, and review work that it’s no longer the deciding factor it was in 2020.”
React Native is a JavaScript-based open source framework developed by Meta in the early 2010s and shared as an easier way to build mobile apps that work across different operating systems, but development with it also includes compromises, particularly around efficiency.
